The Beginning of Ownership
by Thorstein Veblen
American Journal of Sociology, vol. 4 (1898-9)
In the accepted economic theories the ground of ownership is
commonly conceived to be the productive labor of the owner. This
is taken, without reflection or question, to be the legitimate
basis of property; he who has produced a useful thing should
possess and enjoy it. On this head the socialists and the
economists of the classical line - the two extremes of economic
speculation - are substantially at one. The point is not in
controversy, or at least it has not been until recently; it has
been accepted as an axiomatic premise. With the socialists it has
served as the ground of their demand that the laborer should
receive the full product of his labor. To classical economists
the axiom has, perhaps, been as much trouble as it has been
worth. It has given them no end of bother to explain how the
capitalist is the "producer" of the goods that pass into his
possession, and how it is true that the laborer gets what he
produces. Sporadic instances of ownership quite dissociated from
creative industry are recognized and taken account of as
departures from the normal; they are due to disturbing causes.
The main position is scarcely questioned, that in the normal case
wealth is distributed in proportion to - and in some cogent sense
because of - the recipient's contribution to the product.
Not only is the productive labor of the owner the definitive
ground of his ownership today, but the derivation of the
institution of property is similarly traced to the productive
labor of that putative savage hunter who produced two deer or one
beaver or twelve fish. The conjectural history of the origin of
property, so far as it has been written by the economists, has
been constructed out of conjecture proceeding on the
preconceptions of Natural Rights and a coercive Order of Nature.
To anyone who approaches the question of ownership with only an
incidental interest in its solution (as is true of the classical,
pre-evolutionary economists), and fortified with the
preconceptions of natural rights, all this seems plain. It
sufficiently accounts for the institution, both in point of
logical derivation and in point of historical development. The
"natural" owner is the person who has "produced" an article, or
who, by a constructively equivalent expenditure of productive
force, has found and appropriated an object. It is conceived that
such a person becomes the owner of the article by virtue of the
immediate logical inclusion of the idea of ownership under the
idea of creative industry.
This natural-rights theory of property makes the creative
effort of an isolated, self-sufficing individual the basis of the
ownership vested in him. In so doing it overlooks the fact that
there is no isolated, self-sufficing individual. All production
is, in fact, a production in and by the help of the community,
and all wealth is such only in society. Within the human period
of the race development, it is safe to say, no individual has
fallen into industrial isolation, so as to produce any one useful
article by his own independent effort alone. Even where there is
no mechanical co-operation, men are always guided by the
experience of others. The only possible exceptions to this rule
are those instances of lost or cast-off children nourished by
wild beasts, of which half-authenticated accounts have gained
currency from time to time. But the anomalous, half-hypothetical
life of these waifs can scarcely have affected social development
to the extent of originating the institution of ownership.
Production takes place only in society-only through the
co-operation of an industrial community. This industrial
community may be large or small; its limits are commonly somewhat
vaguely defined; but it always comprises a group large enough to
contain and transmit the traditions, tools, technical knowledge,
and usages without which there can be no industrial organization
and no economic relation of individuals to one another or to
their environment. The isolated individual is not a productive
agent. What he can do at best is to live from season to season,
as the non-gregarious animals do. There can be no production
without technical knowledge; hence no accumulation and no wealth
to be owned, in severalty or otherwise. And there is no technical
knowledge apart from an industrial community. Since there is no
individual production and no individual productivity, the
natural-rights preconception that ownership rests on the
individually productive labor of the owner reduces itself to
absurdity, even under the logic of its own assumptions.
Some writers who have taken up the question from the
ethnological side hold that the institution is to be traced to
the customary use of weapons and ornaments by individuals. Others
have found its origin in the social group's occupation of a given
piece of land, which it held forcibly against intruders, and
which it came in this way to "own." The latter hypothesis bases
the collective ownership of land on a collective act of seizure,
or tenure by prowess, so that it differs fundamentally from the
view which bases ownership on productive labor.
The view that ownership is an outgrowth of the customary
consumption of such things as weapons and ornaments by
individuals is well supported by appearances and has also the
qualified sanction of the natural-rights preconception. The
usages of all known primitive tribes seem at first sight to bear
out this view. In all communities the individual members exercise
a more or less unrestrained right of use and abuse over their
weapons, if they have any, as well as over many articles of
ornament, clothing, and the toilet. In the eyes of the modern
economist this usage would count as ownership. So that, if the
question is construed to be simply a question of material fact,
as to the earliest emergence of usages which would in the
latter-day classification be brought under the head of ownership,
then it would have to be said that ownership must have begun with
the conversion of these articles to individual use. But the
question will have to be answered in the contrary sense if we
shift our ground to the point of view of the primitive men whose
institutions are under review. The point in question is the
origin of the institution of ownership, as it first takes shape
in the habits of thought of the early barbarian. The question
concerns the derivation of the idea of ownership or property.
What is of interest for the present purpose is not whether we,
with our preconceptions, would look upon the relation of the
primitive savage or barbarian to his slight personal effects as a
relation of ownership, but whether that is his own apprehension
of the matter. It is a question as to the light in which the
savage himself habitually views these objects that pertain
immediately to his person and are set apart for his habitual use.
Like all questions of the derivation of institutions, it is
essentially a question of folk-psychology, not of mechanical
fact; and, when so conceived, it must be answered in the
negative.
The unsophisticated man, whether savage or civilized, is
prone to conceive phenomena in terms of personality; these being
terms with which he has a first-hand acquaintance. This habit is
more unbroken in the savage than in civilized men. All obvious
manifestations of force are apprehended as expressions of
conation - effort put forth for a purpose by some agency similar
to the human will. The point of view of the archaic culture is
that of forceful, pervading personality, whose unfolding life is
the substantial fact held in view in every relation into which
men or things enter. This point of view in large measure shapes
and colors all the institutions of the early culture -and in a
less degree the later phases of culture. Under the guidance of
this habit of thought, the relation of any individual to his
personal effects is conceived to be of a more intimate kind than
that of ownership simply. Ownership is too external and colorless
a term to describe the fact.
In the apprehension of the savage and the barbarian the
limits of his person do not coincide with the limits which modern
biological science would recognize. His individuality is
conceived to cover, somewhat vaguely and uncertainly, a pretty
wide fringe of facts and objects that pertain to him more or less
immediately. To our sense of the matter these items lie outside
the limits of his person, and to many of them we would conceive
him to stand in an economic rather than in an organic relation.
This quasi-personal fringe of facts and objects commonly
comprises the man's shadow; the reflection of his image in water
or any similar surface; his name; his peculiar tattoo marks; his
totem, if he has one; his glance; his breath, especially when it
is visible; the print of his hand and foot; the sound of his
voice; any image or representation of his person; any excretions
or exhalations from his person; parings of his nails; cuttings of
his hair; his ornaments and amulets; clothing that is in daily
use, especially what has been shaped to his person, and more
particularly if there is wrought into it any totemic or other
design peculiar to him; his weapons, especially his favorite
weapons and those which he habitually carries. Beyond these there
is a great number of other, remoter things which may or may not
be included in the quasi-personal fringe.
As regards this entire range of facts and objects, it is to
be said that the "zone of influence" of the individual's
personality is not conceived to cover them all with the same
degree of potency; his individuality shades off by insensible,
penumbral gradations into the external world. The objects and
facts that fall within the quasi-personal fringe figure in the
habits of thought of the savage as personal to him in a vital
sense. They are not a congeries of things to which he stands in
an economic relation and to which he has an equitable, legal
claim. These articles are conceived to be his in much the same
sense as his hands and feet are his, or his pulse-beat, or his
digestion, or the heat of his body, or the motions of his limbs
or brain.
For the satisfaction of any who may be inclined to question
this view, appeal may be taken to the usages of almost any
people. Some such notion of a pervasive personality, or a
penumbra of personality, is implied, for instance, in the giving
and keeping of presents and mementos. It is more indubitably
present in the working of charms; in all sorcery; in the
sacraments and similar devout observances; in such practices as
the Tibetan prayer-wheel; in the adoration of relics, images, and
symbols; in the almost universal veneration of consecrated places
and structures; in astrology; in divination by means of
hair-cuttings, nail-parings, photographs, etc. Perhaps the least
debatable evidence of belief in such a quasi-personal fringe is
afforded by the practices of sympathetic magic; and the practices
are strikingly similar in substance the world over-from the
love-charm to the sacrament. Their substantial ground is the
belief that a desired effect can be wrought upon a given person
through the means of some object lying within his quasi-personal
fringe. The person who is approached in this way may be a
fellow-mortal, or it may be some potent spiritual agent whose
intercession is sought for good or ill. If the sorcerer or anyone
who works a charm can in any way get at the "penumbra" of a
person's individuality, as embodied in his fringe of
quasi-personal facts, he will be able to work good or ill to the
person to whom the fact or object pertains; and the magic rites
performed to this end will work their effect with greater force
and precision in proportion as the object which affords the point
of attack is more intimately related to the person upon whom the
effect is to be wrought. An economic relation, simply, does not
afford a handle for sorcery. It may be set down that whenever the
relation of a person to a given object is made use of for the
purposes of sympathetic magic, the relation. is conceived to be
something more vital than simple legal ownership.
Such meager belongings of the primitive savage as would under
the nomenclature of a later day be classed as personal property
are not thought of by him as his property at all; they pertain
organically to his person. Of the things comprised in his
quasi-personal fringe all do not pertain to him with the same
degree of intimacy or persistency; but those articles which are
more remotely or more doubtfully included under his individuality
are not therefore conceived to be partly organic to him and
partly his property simply. The alternative does not lie between
this organic relation and ownership. It may easily happen that a
given article lying along the margin of the quasi-personal fringe
is eliminated from it and is alienated, either by default through
lapse of time or by voluntary severance of the relation. But when
this happens the article is not conceived to escape from the
organic relation into a remoter category of things that are owned
by and external to the person in question. If an object escapes
in this way from the organic sphere of one person, it may pass
into the sphere of another; or, if it is an article that lends
itself to common use, it may pass into the common stock of the
community.
As regards this common stock, no concept of ownership, either
communal or individual, applies in the primitive community. The
idea of a communal ownership is of relatively late growth, and
must by psychological necessity have been preceded by the idea of
individual ownership. Ownership is an accredited discretionary
power over an object on the ground of a conventional claim; it
implies that the owner is a personal agent who takes thought for
the disposal of the object owned. A personal agent is an
individual, and it is only by an eventual refinement - of the
nature of a legal fiction - that any group of men is conceived to
exercise a corporate discretion over objects. Ownership implies
an individual owner. It is only by reflection, and by extending
the scope of a concept which is already familiar, that a
quasi-personal corporate discretion and control of this kind
comes to be imputed to a group of persons. Corporate ownership is
quasi-ownership only; it is therefore necessarily a derivative
concept, and cannot have preceded the concept of individual
ownership of which it is a counterfeit.
After the idea of ownership has been elaborated and has
gained some consistency, it is not unusual to find the notion of
pervasion by the user's personality applied to articles owned by
him. At the same time a given article may also be recognized as
lying within the quasi-personal fringe of one person while it is
owned by another - as, for instance, ornaments and other articles
of daily use which in a personal sense belong to a slave or to an
inferior member of a patriarchal household, but which as property
belong to the master or head of the household. The two
categories, (a) things to which one's personality extends by way
of pervasion and (b) things owned, by no means coincide; nor does
the one supplant the other. The two ideas are so far from
identical that the same object may belong to one person under the
one concept and to another person under the other; and, on the
other hand, the same person may stand in both relations to a
given object without the one concept being lost in the other. A
given article may change owners without passing out of the
quasi-personal fringe of the person under whose "self" it has
belonged, as, for instance, a photograph or any other memento. A
familiar instance is the mundane ownership of any consecrated
place or structure which in the personal sense belongs to the
saint or deity to whom it is sacred.
The two concepts are so far distinct, or even disparate, as
to make it extremely improbable that the one has been developed
out of the other by a process of growth. A transition involving
such a substitution of ideas could scarcely take place except on
some notable impulse from without. Such a step would amount to
the construction of a new category and a reclassification of
certain selected facts under the new head. The impulse to
reclassify the facts and things that are comprised in the
quasi-personal fringe, so as to place some of them, together with
certain other things, under the new category of ownership, must
come from some constraining exigency of later growth than the
concept whose province it invades. The new category is not simply
an amplified form of the old. Not every item that was originally
conceived to belong to an individual by way of pervasion comes to
be counted as an item of his wealth after the idea of wealth has
come into vogue. Such items, for instance, as a person's
footprint, or his image or effigy, or his name, are very tardily
included under the head of articles owned by him, if they are
eventually included at all. It is a fortuitous circumstance if
they come to be owned by him, but they long continue to hold
their place in his quasi-personal fringe. The disparity of the
two concepts is well brought out by the case of the domestic
animals. These non-human individuals are incapable of ownership,
but there is imputed to them the attribute of a pervasive
individuality, which extends to such items as their footprints,
their stalls, clippings of hair, and the like. These items are
made use of for the purposes of sympathetic magic even in modern
civilized communities. An illustration that may show this
disparity between ownership and pervasion in a still stronger
light is afforded by the vulgar belief that the moon's phases may
have a propitious or sinister effect on human affairs. The
inconstant moon is conceived to work good or ill through a
sympathetic influence or spiritual infection which suggests a
quasi-personal fringe, but which assuredly does not imply
ownership on her part.
Ownership is not a simple and instinctive notion that is
naively included under the notion of productive effort on the one
hand, nor under that of habitual use on the other. It is not
something given to begin with, as an item of the isolated
individual's mental furniture; something which has to be
unlearned in part when men come to co-operate in production and
make working arrangements and mutual renunciations under the
stress of associated life - after the manner imputed by the
social-contract theory. It is a conventional fact and has to be
learned; it is a cultural fact which has grown into an
institution in the past through a long course of habituation, and
which is transmitted from generation to generation as all
cultural facts are.
On going back a little way into the cultural history of our
own past, we come upon a situation which says that the fact of a
person's being engaged in industry was prima facie evidence that
he could own nothing. Under serfdom and slavery those who work
cannot own, and those who own cannot work. Even very recently -
culturally speaking - there was no suspicion that a woman's work,
in the patriarchal household, should entitle her to own the
products of her work. Farther back in the barbarian culture,
while the patriarchal household was in better preservation than
it is now, this position was accepted with more unquestioning
faith. The head of the household alone could hold property; and
even the scope of his ownership was greatly qualified if he had a
feudal superior. The tenure of property is a tenure by prowess,
on the one hand, and a tenure by sufferance at the hands of a
superior, on the other hand. The recourse to prowess as the
definitive basis of tenure becomes more immediate and more
habitual the farther the development is traced back into the
early barbarian culture; until, on the lower levels of barbarism
or the upper levels of savagery, "the good old plan" prevails
with but little mitigation. There are always certain conventions,
a certain understanding as to what are the legitimate conditions
and circumstances that surround ownership and its transmission,
chief among which is the fact of habitual acceptance. What has
been currently accepted as the status quo-vested interest - is
right and good so long as it does not meet a challenge backed by
irresistible force. Property rights sanctioned by immemorial
usage are inviolable, as all immemorial usage is, except in the
face of forcible dispossession. But seizure and forcible
retention very shortly gain the legitimation of usage, and the
resulting tenure becomes inviolable through habituation. Beati
possidentes.
Throughout the barbarian culture, where this tenure by
prowess prevails, the population falls into two economic classes:
those engaged in industrial employments, and those engaged in
such non-industrial pursuits as war, government, sports, and
religious observances. In the earlier and more naive stages of
barbarism the former, in the normal case, own nothing; the latter
own such property as they have seized, or such as has, under the
sanction of usage, descended upon them from their forebears who
seized and held it. At a still lower level of culture, in the
primitive savage horde, the population is not similarly divided
into economic classes. There is no leisure class resting its
prerogative on coercion, prowess, and immemorial status; and
there is also no ownership.
It will hold as a rough generalization that in communities
where there is no invidious distinction between employments, as
exploit, on the one hand, and drudgery, on the other, there is
also no tenure of property. In the cultural sequence, ownership
does not begin before the rise of a canon of exploit; but it is
to be added that it also does not seem to begin with the first
beginning of exploit as a manly occupation. In these very rude
early communities, especially in the unpropertied hordes of
peaceable savages, the rule is that the product of any member's
effort is consumed by the group to which he belongs; and it is
consumed collectively or indiscriminately, without question of
individual right or ownership. The question of ownership is not
brought up by the fact that an article has been produced or is at
hand in finished form for consumption.
The earliest occurrence of ownership seems to fall in the
early stages of barbarism, and the emergence of the institution
of ownership is apparently a concomitant of the transition from a
peaceable to a predatory habit of life. It is a prerogative of
that class in the barbarian culture which leads a life of exploit
rather than of industry. The pervading characteristic of the
barbarian culture, as distinguished from the peaceable phase of
life that precedes it, is the element of exploit, coercion, and
seizure. In its earlier phases ownership is this habit of
coercion and seizure reduced to system and consistency under the
surveillance of usage.
The practice of seizing and accumulating goods on individual
account could not have come into vogue to the extent of founding
a new institution under the peaceable communistic regime of
primitive savagery; for the dissensions arising from any such
resort to mutual force and fraud among its members would have
been fatal to the group. For a similar reason individual
ownership of consumable goods could not come in with the first
beginnings of predatory life; for the primitive fighting horde
still needs to consume its scanty means of subsistence in common,
in order to give the collective horde its full fighting
efficiency. Otherwise it would succumb before any rival horde
that had not yet given up collective consumption.
With the advent of predatory life comes the practice of
plundering - of seizing goods from the enemy. But in order that
the plundering habit should give rise to individual ownership of
the things seized, these things must be goods of a somewhat
lasting kind, and not immediately consumable means of
subsistence. Under the primitive culture the means of subsistence
are habitually consumed in common by the group, and the manner in
which such goods are consumed is fixed according to an elaborate
system of usage. This usage is not readily broken over, for it is
a substantial part of the habits of life of every individual
member. The practice of collective consumption is at the same
time necessary to the survival of the group, and this necessity
is present in men's minds and exercises a surveillance over the
formation of habits of thought as to what is right and seemly.
Any propensity to aggression at this early stage will, therefore,
not assert itself in the seizure and retention of consumable
goods; nor does the temptation to do so readily present itself,
since the idea of individual appropriation of a store of goods is
alien to the archaic man's general habits of thought.
The idea of property is not readily attached to anything but
tangible and lasting articles. It is only where commercial
development is well advanced - where bargain and sale is a large
feature in the community's life-that the more perishable articles
of consumption are thought of as items of wealth at all. The
still more evanescent results of personal service are still more
difficult to bring in under the idea of wealth. So much so that
the attempt to classify services as wealth is meaningless to
laymen, and even the adept economists hold a divided opinion as
to the intelligibility of such a classification. In the
common-sense apprehension the idea of property is not currently
attached to any but tangible, vendible goods of some durability.
This is true even in modern civilized communities, where
pecuniary ideas and the pecuniary point of view prevail. In a
like manner and for a like reason, in an earlier, non-commercial
phase of culture there is less occasion for and greater
difficulty in applying the concept of ownership to anything but
obviously durable articles.
But durable articles of use and consumption which are seized
in the raids of a predatory horde are either articles of general
use or they are articles of immediate and continued personal use
to the person who has seized them. In the former case the goods
are consumed in common by the group, without giving rise to a
notion of ownership; in the latter case they fall into the class
of things that pertain organically to the person of their user,
and they would, therefore, not figure as items of property or
make up a store of wealth.
It is difficult to see how an institution of ownership could
have arisen in the early days of predatory life through the
seizure of goods, but the case is different with the seizure of
persons. Captives are items that do not fit into the scheme of
communal consumption, and their appropriation by their individual
captor works no manifest detriment to the group. At the same time
these captives continue to be obviously distinct from their
captor in point of individuality, and so are not readily brought
in under the quasi-personal fringe. The captives taken under rude
conditions are chiefly women. There are good reasons for this.
Except where there is a slave class of men, the women are more
useful, as well as more easily controlled, in the primitive
group. Their labor is worth more to the group than their
maintenance, and as they do not carry weapons, they are less
formidable than men captives would be. They serve the purpose of
trophies very effectually, and it is therefore worth while for
their captor to trace and keep in evidence his relation to them
as their captor. To this end he maintains an attitude of
dominance and coercion toward women captured by him; and, as
being the insignia of his prowess, he does not suffer them to
stand at the beck and call of rival warriors. They are fit
subjects for command and constraint; it ministers to both his
honor and his vanity to domineer over them, and their utility in
this respect is very great. But his domineering over them is the
evidence of his prowess, and it is incompatible with their
utility as trophies that other men should take the liberties with
his women which serve as evidence of the coercive relation of
captor.
When the practice hardens into custom, the captor comes to
exercise a customary right to exclusive use and abuse over the
women he has seized; and this customary right of use and abuse
over an object which is obviously not an organic part of his
person constitutes the relation of ownership, as naively
apprehended. After this usage of capture has found its way into
the habits of the community, the women so held in constraint and
in evidence will commonly fall into a conventionally recognized
marriage relation with their captor. The result is a new form of
marriage, in which the man is master. This ownership-marriage
seems to be the original both of private property and of the
patriarchal household. Both of these great institutions are,
accordingly, of an emulative origin.
The varying details of the development whereby ownership
extends to other persons than captured women cannot be taken up
here; neither can the further growth of the marriage institution
that came into vogue at the same time with ownership. Probably at
a point in the economic evolution not far subsequent to the
definitive installation of the institution of ownership-marriage
comes, as its consequence, the ownership of consumable goods. The
women held in servile marriage not only render personal service
to their master, but they are also employed in the production of
articles of use. All the noncombatant or ignoble members of the
community are habitually so employed. And when the habit of
looking upon and claiming the persons identified with my
invidious interest, or subservient to me, as "mine" has become an
accepted and integral part of men's habits of thought, it becomes
a relatively easy matter to extend this newly achieved concept of
ownership to the products of the labor performed by the persons
so held in ownership. And the same propensity for emulation which
bears so great a part in shaping the original institution of
ownership extends its action to the new category of things owned.
Not only are the products of the women's labor claimed and valued
for their serviceability in furthering the comfort and fullness
of life of the master, but they are valuable also as a
conspicuous evidence of his possessing many and efficient
servants, and they are therefore useful as an evidence of his
superior force. The appropriation and accumulation of consumable
goods could scarcely have come into vogue as a direct outgrowth
of the primitive horde-communism, but it comes in as an easy and
unobtrusive consequence of the ownership of persons.